Feasibility of a Robotic Walking Avatar for Social Pilgrimage: The First Saint James Way Experience

In the field of social robotics, there is a growing interest in robotic assistants for culture and tourism, and recent advances in 5G cellular communications, radically improving end-to-end latency and throughput, are key enablers in this regard. The Saint James Way (the Way) to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, is one of the main pilgrimage routes in Christianity. Over 430,000 pilgrims traveled to Santiago in 2022. Many of them cited motivations for travel other than religion, making the Way a major European touristic attraction linking many historical landmarks in Spain. In this article, we present and describe our experience in this scenario with a robotic walking avatar that was teleoperated from Italy (2,000 km away). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the feasibility of such an avatar has been quantitatively assessed in terms of teleoperation performance, terrain crossing capacity, and autonomy.